Hot air on Cloud and various…

VMware Cloud Foundation

Another VMWorld done… and now for the weeks of recoding catchup on deep-dive goodness. There is plenty of detailed information to finally clear up the speculation and FUD that has been circulating on VMware Cloud on AWS over the last 12 months.

For your convenience I have collected available VMC sessions for easy consumption. I’ll follow up this post with my top 10 once I have trawled through all the below.

Like this:

Intro: So you may have been following my VCA Dissected series, but in line with the recent expansion of VMware Cloud Services my role as a Cloud Specialist has diversified to include all things VMware & Cloud. With that in mind, a series name change is in order… So VCADissected becomes VMware Cloud(s) Dissected.

All of the (VMware) Clouds…

Holy moly, it’s been a crazy few months on the road with VMWorld! So many game changing announcements delivered through keynotes, breakout sessions and group discussions. In addition to general announcements on vSphere 6.5, EUC and Cloud Native Apps, we were also introduced to several new VMware public cloud offerings and associated services. For the purposes of clarity, I’m going to give a high-level break down of each platform within VMware’s Cross Cloud Architecture (not including Cross Cloud Services) to try and illustrate where each will be most effective.

First things first. If you haven’t watched day one keynote from VMWorld Europe, I highly recommend you do so… (click on image to view the recording. If you’re not interested in the reasoning behind the vision, skip to about 30 mins in).

To summarize, P.G. talked through his predictions for cloud consumption trends in the near (and not so near) future which set the stage to announce VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture; a set of converged software services incorporating major partnerships with leaders in hyper-scale cloud. So let’s dig a little deeper.

Note: There were plenty of disclaimers and forward looking statements on tech previews in the VMWorld presentations, public FAQ’s, demos and press releases, so please understand that anything I mention here is subject to change as more information is released.

VMware Cloud (VMC) on Amazon Web Services

Boom, the cat’s finally out of the bag. As many of the talking heads have pointed out this is about as significant as any cloud partnership could be. Here are some of the highlights I have chosen from the recent VMWorld VMC sessions.

The big stuff…

The VMware SDDC stack (vSphere 6.5, VSAN & NSX) available within AWS Datacenter’s, on AWS infrastructure dedicated to this service.

VMC upgrades, maintenance and billing are exclusively managed by VMware.

Non-VMC services are still billed and managed by AWS directly.

VMC can be consumed as a standalone platform on AWS, as a hybrid cloud through vCenter Enhanced Linked Mode, or (in the future) cloud-to-cloud between AWS regions/availability zones through the same mechanism.

Continuous upgrades of the SDDC components (including vCenter) on AWS will be scheduled and executed by VMware.

Billed by the hour, or procured for a reduced price over 12 or 36 months in a similar commercial model to AWS reserved instances. Customers will also be able to leverage their existing investments in VMware licenses through VMware customer loyalty programs.

Availability mid-2017.

The technical stuff…

Initial deployment of between 4 to 64 hosts, which can be scaled through manual process or by;

There’s not a whole bunch of detailed information on VMC right now as it’s early days, but Frank Denneman’s blog and the AWS blog is a good place to start. Note, during the ‘Closer Look’ VMWorld breakout session it was also acknowledged that a number of announcements are still to be revealed at AWS Re:Invent at the end of November.

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on IBM Softlayer

VMware Cloud Foundation is the same SDDC stack (vSphere, VSAN, NSX) as VMC but with VMware SDDC Manager as the overlay software which handles platform deployment, configuration and ongoing SDDC lifecycle tasks for specific use cases. What makes VCF different from VMC (other than the obvious partnerships), is that Cloud Foundation can be deployed privately within our own datacenters in addition to public cloud.

The global partnership with IBM was announced at VMWorld Las Vegas and they will be the first global cloud service provider to offer Cloud Foundation. vCloud Air will also join IBM in the near future in addition to other numerous VCAN providers throughout 2017.

Note, I’m not really going into any detail about VCF as this is a public cloud breakdown. I would recommend a read of Ray Heffer’s fantastic official VMware blog digging deeper into VCF’s underlying architecture.

In addition to the numerous benefits of VCF architecture here are some of the notes I have taken around the IBM partnership.

True BYO public cloud for those who require full access to all SDDC functions, including the upgrade and patching of individual SDDC components which is maintained by the customer, not VMware (or IBM without additional services).

Ability to build and manage identical SDDC components both on-prem and in public cloud.

Note that VCF is not the only way to consume VMware on IBM Softlayer as IBM customers have previously been able to select individual VMware technologies and deploy them on IBM Softlayer bare metal. This also allows customers to bring their existing licensing to IBM Cloud, which can be a real bonus when migrating from, or replacing an existing datacenter. Note, as an example of how much complexity is actually involved with deploying an entire SDDC platform independently on IBM Softlayer I would suggest a read of the extremely comprehensive reference architecture here.

vCloud Air (non-VCF services)

Contrary to a number of blogs and articles I have read recently, vCloud Air is here to stay, albeit with a renewed focus to address specific VMware hybrid-cloud challenges. I’m not going to cover the existing vCloud Air service here as it has been available for a while now and we should all know it back to front, right? 🙂

In addition to VCF on vCloud Air, there were numerous announcements including;

Enhancements to Hybrid Cloud Manager with the full release of version 2.0, including;

Zero downtime Cross-Cloud vMotion utilizing fully integrated WAN opto, proximity routing. Note: This has no dependency on vSphere 6.x and can be used with vSphere 5.5 today.

NSX policy migration.

Proxy support.

New services for Enterprise DR, Hybrid DMZ and DMZ lite.

Enhanced Integrated Identity & Access Management.

Increased DPC host memory capacity (up to 1TB per host)

Today, vCloud Air is still the only way to subscribe to a fully managed VMware cloud service and take full advantage of Hybrid Cloud Manager. As an added benefit, the entry point for Dedicated Private Cloud (as a direct comparison) is only a single N+1 host meaning the overall initial commitment is not as significant as the other services.

Summing up…

Although the these individual cloud offerings may seem to overlap they each address a different set of challenges by integrating with key partners who are market leaders in a specific hybrid/public cloud capabilities. This puts VMware customers in a unique position of having a choice of multiple clouds depending on individual requirements.

In addition to the above, VMware also has 4000+ vCloud Air Network partners who all offer unique services with VMware software at the core. If I even began to try and break down the breadth of services covered through these partners this blog would turn into War & Peace…

I have only covered a very small amount of high-level info here as I hope to flesh out each service as more information is released. Comments, opinions and feedback in general is always welcome. If your attending vForum Australia 2016 I will also be presenting a couple of sessions on VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture and demoing VMC on AWS, so come and say hello and give me your take on this new world…